The California
Supreme Court yesterday denied review of a Court of Appeal decision rejecting
an effort to block a newspaper from publishing information on the backgrounds
of certain Los Angeles deputy sheriffs.

The justices, at
their weekly conference in San Francisco, unanimously left standing the ruling
of this district’s Div. Three in Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs
v. Los Angeles Times Communications (2015) 239 Cal. App. 4th 808. The
ruling was issued in July and ordered published by the Court of Appeal Aug. 19.

ALADS sought to
have the Los Angeles Times enjoined from publishing a list of officers who had
worked for the phased-out Office of Public Safety and successfully gained
employment with the Sheriff’s Department.

Failed to
Persuade

The union failed
to persuade the appeals court that because the applications of the job-seekers
had to have been pilfered, a prior restraint was justified.

“…ALADS has
cited no case permitting the kind of injunction it seeks here, to restrain a
newspaper from publishing news articles on a matter of public concern: the
qualifications of applicants for jobs as law enforcement officers. ALADS has
cited no case because there is no such case. For more than one hundred years,
federal and state courts have refused to allow the subjects of potential news
reports to stop journalists from publishing reports about them.”

Egerton cited
the Pentagon Papers case, New York Times Co. v. United States (1971)
403 U.S. 713.

There, the
United States Supreme Court held that the New York Times and the Washington
Post could not be barred from publishing portions of the secret “Report of the
Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force” on U.S. military and
political involvement in Vietnam from 1945-67.

Applying that
case, Egerton said, the injunction sought by ALADS “would be an
unconstitutional prior restraint.”

Egerton
declared:

“Law enforcement
officers protect the public. They prevent crime, and they investigate and make
arrests when crimes occur. They carry and use firearms and other weapons. They
are authorized to use deadly force and to restrain individual liberty. The
public has a strong interest in the qualifications and conduct of law
enforcement officers….Here, a labor union and unnamed officers seek to stop a
newspaper from publishing news reports about the hiring and evaluation of
officers, including allegations of past misconduct….The trial court properly
granted the Times’ anti SLAPP motion.”